Vitamin D in winter.

 Vitamin D deficiency can be more common in winter - here’s food meeting your daily dose. 

VITAMIN D is essential for regulating the amount of calcium and phosphate in your body, which helps keep bones, teeth and muscles healthy. During the warmer months, your body is able to synthesise this vitamin from sunlight, however you might want to opt for other sources now. 

Here you can find the foods for an extra vitamin D boost, with one meeting exactly the daily recommended intake. 

VITAMIN D is essential for regulating the amount of calcium and phosphate in your body, which helps keep bones, teeth and muscles healthy. During the warmer months, your body is able to synthesise this vitamin from sunlight, however you might want to opt for other sources now. Here are the foods for an extra vitamin D boost, with one meeting exactly the daily recommended intake.

However, due to the lack of sunshine during winter, people are not able to synthesise this vitamin D organically. 

Good sources of the sunshine vitamin include:

• Oily fish

• Red meat

• Liver

• Egg yolks

• Fortified foods (some fat spreads and breakfast cereals).

• Oily fish describes types including salmon, sardines, herring and mackerel. 

Salmon is the one food packed with this vitamin D and can provide your recommended daily amount.

Anyone older than one year needs a daily dose of 10 micrograms, the health service states.

Another amount used to measure vitamin D content is International Units (IU).

One microgram of this vitamin D is equivalent to 40 IU. This means your recommended daily intake is 400 IU (International Unit). 

About 85 grams of salmon contains 447 IU, meeting the recommended dose.

But the preparation process might get rid of some of this vitamin D content, according to research from the US National Library of Medicine.

The researchers found that baked salmon had almost the same content of IU, while salmon fried in vegetable oil lost almost 50 percent of the vitamin.

Another factor is whether the salmon was caught in the wild or farmed. 

In the study, the wild catch had a higher amount of the sunshine vitamin, scoring 988 IU, compared to the farmed counterpart containing only 250 IU.

You might have also heard that cow’s milk is a good source of vitamin D. However, the cow’s milk isn’t fortified with this vitamin in the UK, compared to other countries.